“The Queen’s representative in Canada has delighted locals and outraged campaigners by eating a chunk of raw seal heart cut freshly from a victim of the annual hunt.”

Note the unreflective use of this phrase: “victim of the annual hunt.” It’s not a seal heart any more. It’s a quasi-human heart.

Which may explain the unconscious origin of the emotion expressed here:

A spokeswoman for Stavros Dimas, the EU Environment Commissioner, refused to acknowledge the challenge last night. “No comment; it’s too bizarre to acknowledge,” she said.

All this somehow made me think about Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist whose then-fashionable structuralist theories cast a dark shadow over my otherwise pleasant life as an English-lit student at the University of Toronto in the mid-1970s.